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Talking Lives

A Conversation About Life History

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Abstract

In the Spring of 1994, Ivor Goodson invited Barry Troyna to London, Ontario to contribute to a study entitled ‘Racial/Ethno cultural Minority Teachers’ Lives’, focusing on the career experiences of ethnic minority teachers in Canada and funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council which I was directing. As part of this contribution Barry agreed to conduct some life history interviews and scrutinise some of the material already collected by the research team, of which Ivor was co-director. Throughout the last 20 or so years Ivor has been a leading advocate for the use of life history methods to study aspects of education and, particularly, teachers’ lives and careers. Not only has he done a considerable amount of such work himself but he has also been very encouraging and supportive of other people using biographical approaches (e.g. Goodson, 1988; Goodson, 1992). Barry Troyna, on the other hand, is best known for his work dealing with aspects of racism and education (e.g. Troyna, 1993), although he too has used life history and is sympathetically disposed to it as a research method and as a strategy for personal and professional development (Sikes & Troyna, 1991).

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© 2011 Sense Publishers

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Goodson, I.F. (2011). Talking Lives. In: Life Politics. SensePublishers. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6091-540-6_2

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